THE CULT OF CELEBRITY

We are fascinated by their every move, we want to know everything about them. Jack Delaney asks why we are obsessed with the rich and famous. Some are born famous (like royalty), some achieve fame (like film stars) and some have fame thrust upon them (like crime victims). Sometimes their celebrity is short-lived, sometimes it lasts a lifetime. In some rare cases, for example Diana, Princess of Wales, and Marilyn Monroe, it can be transformed by death into a sort of iconic status. But whatever the causes or circumstances, being a celebrity changes your relationship with the world. From being a private person, you become public property, and everybody wants to claim a bit of you. You are the object of envy as well as admiration, fair game for criticism, interrogation, ridicule and spite.

We make em, we break em

We treat the famous people with a mixture of reverence and brutality. We adore them, praise them, scrutinize them and destroy them. We make them unable to tell where their real selves end and the PR-manufactured images begin. We have no mercy, we show no shame. It is easy to assume that all aspects of a celebrity life are free to be examined because he or she is on show, which means he or she doesnt have the same reality as everyone else. And it is precisely because many modern celebrities are no more special than the rest of us that we feel justified in treating them with such contempt. We build them up and knock them down.

So who are the famous?

It used to be the case that fame was a consequence of some mighty achievement or an unpleasant criminal act, when newspapers were filled largely with accounts of such things as earthquakes and wars, and when it was badly considered for journalists to examine the private lives of famous people, even the very famous. It is now possible for people who are living ordinary private lives to become famous, for at least a short time, through the media by appearing on game shows or confessional TV, for instance, or by volunteering to be the subject of a fly-on-the-wall documentary. The readiness of people to let programme-makers into their homes, to answer the most intimate questions about their lives, and to allow themselves to be filmed in the most undignified situations, never stops to amaze. Given this ghastly invasion of ones life, why is fame so desirable? Ask an average bunch of 10-year-olds what they want to do with their lives, and a large proportion of them will say that they would like to be famous. Not for anything in particular. Just famous. Period. In the adult population, otherwise perfectly normal people think nothing of confessing all about their personal tragedies on daytime television.

Why are we so obsessed?

The American writer Normal Mailer said that in an age without religion, celebrities are our new gods. If we have no faith in an afterlife and this life is our only one, then celebrity is the nearest any of us will get to immortality, and the pursuit of it becomes more urgent. At the

pathological extreme of this motivation are murderers like Mark Chapman, who assassinated John Lennon partly, he said, to make himself famous. Another feature of modern society is the power and omnipresence of the mass media. Its explosive expansion in the last couple of decades has created an insatiable need for new material. All the newspapers, magazines, television and radio programmes require an endless supply of human-interest stories. These are increasingly delivered in the form of interviews, profiles, gossip columns, photoshoots at gatherings, etc about people who are celebrated for something they have done, or for a position they occupy in society, or in some cases for just being a celebrity. There are some totally talentless people who are simply famous for being famous. As Andy Warhol said In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.

Love it or hate it?

The American writer, Jay McInerney, commented, I have enjoyed a little celebrity in my time, and I have looked at any number of models I have indulged in small talk about popular film stars. But at least I hate myself in the morning. I fear as a nation were losing our sense of shame in this regard. So how do you feel when you read a gossip magazine, or tune into confessional TV? Do you love it or hate it? What can be done to curb our fascination, particularly when the glittery sacrificial lambs go so willingly to slaughter? Probably not a lot.